Poignant and powerfully affirmative, this account offers an intensive reading experience that should particularly appeal to...
An author and health coach divulges how she overcame abuse and physical and mental anguish to emerge as a strong, compassionate individual.
In her own words, Carranza’s epiphanic debut memoir unfolds “like the plot of a Lifetime miniseries or a telenovela.” And in many ways, it does. She writes frankly about her childhood in Mexico. According to the author, she faced undisciplined sibling abuse at the hands of her older sister while trying to come to terms with a distant mother who “never said the words I desperately needed to hear.” These problems spurred years of deteriorating self-esteem and suicide attempts. Despite the doting adoration of her grandparents and uncle, Carranza felt less than loved. As she matured, her descent into debilitating depression continued after a teenage miscarriage, even while the bond with her father strengthened. The writer’s world crumbled further after her father was brutally murdered at age 43 and she was left with unanswered questions and unprocessed grief well into her adult years. In Carranza’s 20s, while modeling, acting, and carelessly becoming involved with kingpins in the local drug cartel, she entered into what she describes as a seven-year horrifically abusive marriage. Thankfully, she found benevolence and became buoyed by her “Earth angels,” individuals who provided solace, guidance, and unconditional friendship. During the nearly fatal birth of her daughter, the author experienced an extraordinary spiritual vision in which Mary Magdalene appeared before her, reinforcing the message that “if I was strong enough and walked through the fire with love, hope, and faith, I’d make it” and “find Heaven on Earth.” As she relates in her moving book, this ethereal episode prompted her to finally end her tortured marriage and rediscover happiness despite a barrage of physical challenges that lay ahead, including kidney problems and her daughter’s teenage battle with Hashimoto’s disease. Fighting through the fear and shame of a botched childhood, Carranza finally reached a catharsis and emerged as a wholly complete, if weathered, “lioness,” who, as the title suggests, believed that “our lives are like the life of a butterfly.” She also shares what she has found to be the “keys to Heaven on Earth,” which should be profoundly motivational and inspiring to readers in a similar situation as the author. Suffused with painful vulnerability, her emotionally raw and vividly written narrative is bifurcated between the angst of a melancholic life and the lush, poetic revelations that eventually superseded all the darkness that came before it. The chapters in Carranza’s memoir read like emotionally acute diary entries dictating the ebb and flow of a life overcome by tragedy yet ultimately yielding to the light of a new day with endless opportunities to reinvigorate love, perseverance, faith, and joy.
Poignant and powerfully affirmative, this account offers an intensive reading experience that should particularly appeal to readers who find themselves unfairly battered by circumstances and the cruel slings and arrows of life.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-953258-02-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Y-O Management
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
There are many universal, compelling issues left unexplored, but Aquan-Assee’s recovery and construction of the narrative...
A slightly out-of-focus, harrowing account of recovery from what a doctor called “horrific” injuries sustained in a 1997 Toronto motorcycle wreck.
Describing in the third person the days of his long coma, he notes the efforts of his family and friends to remain with him 24/7, attempting to keep him mentally and physically stimulated. Aquan-Assee then downshifts into a slow-motion first person account of his own frustrating efforts to regain physical and mental focus, fighting back memory loss and struggling to remember people’s names from one second to the next. Neither angle is entirely satisfactory to particularize what surely was a long and arduous battle by the 29-year-old to pull himself back, often by the fingernails, into a world in which he felt increasingly out of touch. For instance, he slides past crucial moments when doctors encouraged his family to “pull the plug,” and their subsequent refusal to do so, even when his life signs were little more than flickers. It would have been helpful to know the thoughts and emotions of his parents and siblings at those precious turning points, as well as the doctors’ reactions to his subsequent recovery–a feat admirably accomplished in spite of their negative proclamations regarding the prospects for his “quality of life.” These are the hot-button issues crying out for greater attention throughout. But Aquan-Assee’s focus remains narrow, limiting the potential audience.
There are many universal, compelling issues left unexplored, but Aquan-Assee’s recovery and construction of the narrative are triumph enough.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0-973-2782-0-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With poetic prose and vivid watercolors, Yang has created a rich portrait of life in China during the 1930s and '40s. Yang chronicles her Baba's (or Daddy's) boyhood and adolescence in 20 tales, each preceded by a watercolor. Baba was the fourth son in the eighth generation of the wealthy House of Yang, and his landscape teems with physical and spiritual dangers. He's threatened by torrential rains, ravenous wolves, red-bearded bandits, famines, demons, Japanese bombs, Russian troops, Communists, Nationalists, even an arranged marriage. When Baba is six, his family is forced out of their Manchurian homeland after the Japanese invasion. They move to China proper, then return five years later when Baba's father loses his job with a mining company. They live under the protective patronage of the family Patriarch until a bloody tug-of-war between followers of Mao and Chiang Kai- shek rends the family and country apart. Ancient legends, political upheavals, and religious ceremonies define Baba's youth. Storytellers teach him about gods and demons, prodigal sons, and the ghosts of the improperly buried. Their wisdom then plays out in his own life as Baba witnesses the goddess of Mercy protect his mother from marauding invaders; the troubled ways of one of his older brothers; and a 49-day funeral ceremony ensuring his great- great-grandfather safe passage to Heaven. Yang's prose feels ancient and foreign; for instance, she describes the effects of the first Japanese bombs: ``The glass windowpanes inhaled and exhaled, but the paper panes heaved a sigh and suddenly gave way, cracking like white porcelain.'' The tension between ancient rituals and modern reality elevates these tales from the merely beautiful into an astonishing personal vision, and a unique portrait emerges of a culture straddling thousands of years. Yang's work is like a lovely painted scroll swimming with wild souls, beasts, birds, flowers, day and night sky, tragedy, and hope.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100063-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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